Boston’s Logan Airport has the full name of General Edward Lawrence Logan International Airport. It was previously called Jeffrey Field until it was renamed in 1943. Edward Lawrence Logan served in the Army and in the National Guard for about 40 years, and served as a politician in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, the Massachusetts State Senate, and as a judge as associate justice of the Municipal Court for the South Boston District. Logan was not an aviator, but he did lobby intensely for veteran benefits to include the high-risk group of pilots.
Milwaukee’s Mitchell International Airport is named in honor of native son Billy Mitchell, a US Army general who championed American air power in the 1920s and '30s. The twin-engined B-25 medium bomber used in WWII was also named in his honor.
Starting in January 1945, Mitchell Field housed more than 3000 German prisoners of war.
A second WWII POW camp existed at Camp McCoy, in Monroe County in western Wisconsin. By the end of WWII it housed roughly 3000 German POWs, along with 2700 Japanese and 500 Korean prisoners, making it the largest permanent Japanese POW camp in the US,
Although the POW facilities were demolished after the war ᴺᴼᵀᴱ, the camp served as a training facility in the post-war era and is still in use today, although it has since been re-designated as Fort McCoy. And in the 1980s, it was one of four military installations pressed into service as a refugee facility, holding and processing nearly 15000 Cuban refugees during and after the period of the Mariel boatlift.
ᴺᴼᵀᴱ – I live about eight miles from the main gate of Fort McCoy. One of these days I’ll have to see if I can go on-post as a visitor and find out if anything remains – plaques, cleared areas, building foundations, monuments or historical markers – to commemorate this period of Wisconsin history.
-“BB”-
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I flew through there once. There was a nice, small museum (or display room) about his life and accomplishments. A mini museum, if you will.
I did my Arctic survival training there one winter. It was colder than a witch’s tic.
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Fort McCoy is named for Major General Robert Bruce McCoy, born in Kenosha WI, who served as an infantry colonel in World War I. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his heroic deeds in WWI. The Croix de Guerre (Cross of War), first awarded during World War I, is a military decoration of France and was commonly bestowed on foreign military forces allied to France.
McCoy led in creating a military post near Sparta WI for training artillery units. He began by buying small tracts and leasing them for grazing, with the proceeds going to finance additional land purchases.
Besides doing my Arctic survival training at Fort McCoy, I’ve also shot artillery there. It’s a wonderful place, a place that a fellow Marine from Wisconsin called the armpit of the state (with apologies to @Bicycle_Bill!).
McCoy is buried nearby, in Sparta WI.
Dr. Leonard McCoy gave his middle initial as “H.” in the 1984 sf film Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. The Starfleet physician’s full middle name has never been established canonically, however.
In the sitcom The Real McCoys, two of the grandsons of Grandpa Amos McCoy are both named Luke. In the first episode of the show, the elder Luke explained it thusly: “Well, you see, in the excitement of having him, Ma and Pa plum forgot they already had me.”
On Cheers, Woody’s full name is Woodrow Tiberius Boyd. Tiberius is also Captain Kirk’s middle name on Star Trek.
Norm Peterson’s first name is not Norman. It’s Hillary.
Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport is named after LCDR Edward “Butch” O’Hare, a WWII fighter ace who, flying an F4F Wildcat, single handedly downed five Japanese bombers on 20 February 1942. For this feat, he became the first US naval aviator to win the Congressional Medal of Honor in the Second World War.
O’Hare was shot down during a nighttime attack on 26 November 1943. His F6F Hellcat was never found.
Major Richard “Dick” Bong was the U.S.'s top fighting ace pilot during WWII; flying a P-38 Lightning for the U.S. Army Air Forces, he was credited with shooting down 40 Japanese planes. Bong died in August of 1945, in a crash of the P-80 jet fighter which he was testing.
Bong was a native of Superior, Wisconsin; during the 1950s, the U.S. Air Force began development of what was to be Bong Air Force Base, located in southeastern Wisconsin. The base was never completed, and the land was turned over to the state of Wisconsin, eventually becoming Bong State Recreation Area – due to the pilot’s name being also the colloquial name for a marijuana pipe, road signs for the recreation area are frequently the target of theft.
Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold is the only member of the U.S. military ever to hold five-star rank in two different services - in the U.S. Army during World War II while leading the Army Air Forces, and later in the newly-created U.S. Air Force. He also remains the only five-star Air Force general ever. He was instructed as a pilot by the Wright Brothers themselves, and was one of the first three pilots in the Army.
Frances Arnold is the first American woman (and fifth woman worldwide) to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, in 2018, for her work on directed evolution. She has said jokingly that the greatest honor she has received is her appearance (as herself) on The Big Bang Theory.
Other Nobel Laureates to appear on the show include George Smoot, Kip Thorne, and Stephen Hawking.
The smoot is a humorous, non-standard unit of measurement, equal in length to the height of then-MIT student Oliver R. Smoot Jr. (5 feet, 7 inches). In 1958, as part of a fraternity pledge stunt, Smoot lay down repeatedly on the Harvard Bridge, so his fraternity brothers could measure the length of the bridge as a multiple of Smoot’s height. The students determined the length of the bridge to be 364.4 smoots.
Oliver Smoot went on to become chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), and president of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). He is a distant relative of astrophysicist and Nobel laureate George Smoot.
Markers are painted at 10-smoot intervals along the Harvard Bridge. During a major reconstruction of the bridge in the 1980s, the new sidewalks were divided into smoot-length slabs rather than the standard six feet, and the smoot markings were painted on the new deck. The original plan during this reconstruction was to remove the smoot markings, but this plan was scrapped when it was revealed that local police routinely using the smoot marks as reference points in accident reports.
Here’s a picture of a smoot mark, from Wikipedia:
In ancient times, measurements of length were based on the human body. Examples included using one’s foot, or the length of a stride, the span of a hand, and the breadth of a thumb. This resulted in many different measurement systems, and the different systems were of course local and not global. One system that became somewhat ‘global’ was the Egyptian cubit which gained favor in approximately 3,000 BC. The cubit was the length from the bent elbow to the end of the extended fingertips. The Egyptians defined a standard for the cubit in the form of a stone rod, and this was then used by people to create their own measuring rods.
Rod Laver of Australia is regarded by many as the greatest tennis player in the history of the sport. He was of average height in his time, 5’8" (which would be considered small today) but combined speed, strength, and agility with tactical strategy.
In tennis the Grand Slam, commonly known as the Calendar Slam is the prestigious achievement of winning all four major championships in the same calendar year: the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open. In singles tennis, men or women, only five players have ever won it, and Rod Laver is the only one to do it twice.
The Grand Slam winners:
1938 Don Budge
1953 Maureen Connolly
1962 Rod Laver
1969 Rod Laver
1970 Margaret Court
1988 Steffi Graf
Although Martina Navratilova did not win the Calendar Slam, she did win six consecutive major women’s singles titles, beginning with the 1983 Wimbledon title. In her career she won 59 major titles: 18 singles, 31 doubles, and 10 mixed doubles.
Criminal mastermind Auric Goldfinger’s plan to seize the American gold supply in the James Bond spy adventure Goldfinger is called Operation Grand Slam.